COLUMN ONE : Trash Idea Rises From the Heap : Composting is gaining new attention as cities struggle with rising mountains of waste and fewer ways of handling it.
The giant yellow drum turned slowly, churning the grimy confetti of society’s leftovers.
Soon fish heads and candy wrappers, disposable diapers and dish rags would emerge with the look and smell of soil, and with no more harmful bacteria than fresh cow manure. For another month or so, the brown loam would be cured in piles, further killing off bacteria to a level no greater than ordinary dirt.
James McNelly was showing off his humble neighborhood compost factory--what he and others consider to be a model system of garbage disposal, as soon as the neighbors get used to the idea.
“The truck that takes solid waste away from the house could be the same truck that brings compost back,” McNelly cheerfully predicted. Some day, he said, “compost plants will be as common as gas stations.”
The once lowly compost process is getting some respect. Environmentalists, municipal garbage engineers and even such giant consumer-goods companies as Procter & Gamble are paying new attention to modern, fast-turnover forms of composting--a process developed by a British agronomist in 19th-Century India to turn fecal matter into safe fertilizer.
Last year, the number of U.S. trash-composting projects in the works rose to 75 from 42, according to a survey by the trade journal BioCycle.
Portland, Ore., has begun construction of a plant using European technology marketed by a local company, Riedel Environmental Technologies Inc. By the end of 1990, Riedel plans to be handling 15% of Portland’s trash. Agripost, a Florida company, just fired up a system to compost from 12% to 15% of Miami’s garbage. Memphis, Tenn., is interested in compost systems. Riverside, San Diego and Santa Barbara are studying composting’s long-term economics.
“Composting will be a major topic of the ‘90s,” says Jerry Powell, a longtime observer of urban-waste debates, now editor of Resource Recycling magazine.
As many Americans now realize, urban household garbage, known in industry jargon as the municipal solid waste stream, has become a rampaging river as engineers, environmentalists, policy makers and entrepreneurs debate how to bring it under control. Composting’s grand opportunity comes amid growing uneasiness that other answers to the garbage problem--recycling, landfills and incinerators among them--have either run their course or don’t go far enough.
“People have thrown up their hands and said, ‘OK, what’s it going to cost for a permanent solution?’ ” agrees Clarence G. Golueke, an old campaigner in the field, now director of research and development for Cal Recovery Systems, a Richmond, Calif., consulting firm. Golueke conducted the first serious U.S. study of urban-waste composting in the Berkeley, Calif., dump three decades ago.
The compost process uses time and heat to break down to its basic organic components material that was once living--killing off harmful viruses and bacteria and turning such pollutants as nitrates into fertilizer.
Process Controlled
Back yard gardeners make compost slowly, exposing their piles of leaves and grass clippings to the weather until they crumble. But operators of modern compost digesters, such as McNelly’s yellow drum, measure every component and control the temperature.
As the cost of dumping garbage--so-called tipping fees--has risen wildly, the modern version of composting has become more attractive financially. Five years ago in the U.S. Northeast, tipping fees of $10 a ton were common. Now they’re as high as $135 in some areas. California dozes in the twilight of low prices today, at an average of $26 per ton. But no one expects that to last.
The tipping fee for St. Cloud, a mid-sized city that switched to composting three years ago, is $69--a bargain compared to $95 at Minneapolis, an hour’s drive away.
But cities are also taking another look at compost simply because they’re running out of landfills, which have been handling 80% of their garbage. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that half of the nation’s landfills will be sealed in five years. Neighborhoods willing to accept new ones are hard to find.
Incinerating city trash is also getting tougher, as many conservationists and community activists complain of environmental drawbacks and high cost. In California alone, 36 of 39 incinerator proposals have failed since 1986.
Less-lavish packaging and recycling also have limits. Though Ralph Nader and others strongly argue that more is possible, the EPA will be “very happy” if these narrow the garbage stream 25% by 1992, says Steven J. Levy, the agency’s municipal-waste technology expert.
Other solutions have fallen by the wayside. Ocean dumping ends next year. The idea of rocketing trash to the sun has become a tired joke from a former era. And shipping waste to rural backwaters has become politically unpopular. Even Louisiana, long considered a most accommodating state, recently turned back the “pooh-pooh choo-choo,” a train loaded with Maryland sewage sludge.
Yet, unlike hazardous and nuclear wastes, which are destined to be isolated by cradle-to-grave regulation, household garbage will always be with us.
Starts in Kitchen
Advocates like Golueke and McNelly, operations director of Recomp Inc., the private waste-disposal company that serves St. Cloud, call for composting as part of a system that begins with recycling in the kitchen. It ends with cans, bottles, paper, plastics and high-quality compost sold to help offset operating costs. By then, only a fifth of the original waste stream--utterly unredeemable carpet, medical waste, old shoes--must be stuffed into the ground.
“We’ll always need landfills,” McNelly admits.
Compost’s success, however, hinges on whether it is clean enough to be useful. McNelly and most others see a market in bulk users that include public highway departments, for soil-enhancement of median strips; landscape firms; Christmas tree growers and eventually garden-supply stores and farmers, as Americans overcome suspicions about soil products recycled, in part, from human waste.
“So the farm will become not our disposal site, but our client,” McNelly predicts.
Yet to some, marketing garbage-derived compost has a shady past.
Efforts to introduce compost systems to the United States a decade ago were thwarted not only by the competition of cheap landfills but by their unneighborly odors and technically inexperienced suppliers. Decomposition can be smelly. And as with any waste, it takes good technology to avoid leaching contaminants into ground water, or retaining toxic materials.
“ ‘Compost’ is not a beloved word around here,” conceded David J. Smith, vice president of Agripost, days before opening the largest urban-waste compost plant in the country, near Miami.
“And I don’t blame people,” Smith said. “The history of composting has been sad and tragic in this country.” When compost was first proposed, he recalls, “out of the woodwork came a bunch of homemade mom-and-pop compost schemes.”
Yet in Europe, particularly, compost systems have been generally successful since after World War II, when Europeans began to rebuild basic public services. Already hard-pressed for landfill sites, they made composting part of their new sanitation systems.
In this country, only the relatively simple composting of sewage sludge and yard waste--leaves and tree trimmings--has caught on. Just a handful of sanitation districts are composting that main river of garbage, none in California.
“Californians always think we’re on the cutting edge, but in this case we’re not,” says Anthony S. Dominski, education director of the Community Environmental Council, based in Santa Barbara. “But my prediction is that we’re going to catch up fast and go ahead of the nation . . . . This issue is going to break very fast in the next year.” Dominski is running a pilot program to help develop a compost system for Santa Barbara and has been in conversation with Ventura and San Bernardino County planners.
Demands of Law
Prodding sanitation districts is a fresh volley of state laws to mandate recycling. Recently, the City of Los Angeles adopted a program that conforms to a new California requirement of 25% less trash going to landfills by 1995; 50% by the year 2000. Florida wants a 30% cut by 1993.
“And communities cannot go beyond 25% recycling without composting,” says Neil Seldman flatly. Seldman, long a recycling and compost advocate, is president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, in Washington, D.C.
Unfortunately, the first wave of compost schemes arrived amid rosy promises of “garbage into gold.” Cities were delighted to hear the now-defunct notion that recycling and composting could pay for their sanitation districts.
Not even close.
Today, the message from sadder but smarter public officials and environmentalists is that waste disposal is part of the cost of consumer goods and packaging. Far from being profit centers, recycling and composting are needed mostly to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills. If compost markets can be developed, the revenue may help offset the expense of environmentally sound sanitation systems, but it will never pay the whole freight.
Still, even for this task, the compost must be of high quality.
This is why many sanitation districts--including Los Angeles County’s--limit their compost to leaves and tree trimmings, to avoid the main waste stream with its diapers, car batteries and, literally, kitchen sinks. Chunks of plastic can make an unsightly mix. Worse, batteries, particularly, can taint the compost with heavy metals, including lead, mercury, zinc and chromium. If concentrations are high enough, environmental regulations leave it with only one legal use--disposal in the very landfills it was meant to avoid.
‘A Sick Fish’
Concern over compost quality loomed large over the decision of the City of Los Angeles this summer to halt six years of negotiations with California Co-Composting Systems Inc., a politically connected Playa del Rey firm. City staffers weren’t all that impressed with the quality of European compost and they feared that the company’s financial plan left the city at sole risk if, in the end, its compost still had to be buried. Councilman Marvin Braude, exasperated with the protracted talks, finally denounced the firm as “a sick fish.”
“In the case of CCSI, we weren’t able to come to terms,” allowed analyst Richard Hart recently. Hart drafted the negative recommendation in the office of the city administrative officer. “But that’s not to say that we’re not still looking.”
“They never believed in (composting),” counters Frances Reyes-Acosta, chief financial officer of California Co-Composting Systems. She and her husband, chief executive officer Joaquin E. Acosta Jr., a former city hall lobbyist, had launched a full offensive for their waste-composting business, with campaign contributions to local politicians and sponsorship of state laws to encourage the industry. Now they have proposed a 1,000-tons-daily plant for Riverside County and say they are negotiating with smaller towns. They expect to do better in less-populated areas, where the true growing cost of waste management isn’t spread out and hidden among taxes charged to big-city residents.
“We think we’ll make our first inroads in the cowboy counties,” Reyes-Acosta says.
In Florida, Agripost has also been the focus of speculation about its compost quality. Unlike other systems, Agripost’s takes the household waste stream virtually intact, without recycling glass, metal or plastic before processing.
Most environmentalists and compost scientists believe this virtually guarantees high levels of heavy metals in the finished compost, limiting its value.
“I don’t know where that idea came from,” Agripost’s David Smith says. “You don’t get high heavy metal rates in household garbage.”
From early test results, Florida state and local officials see no practical restrictions to using Agripost’s product. Agripost plans soon to be in full operation, composting an impressive 800 tons a day, and has already delivered its first test loads.
Refining System
Recomp, a subsidiary of Bonneville Pacific Corp., a Salt Lake City-based energy and waste-management company, has spent the last three years refining a system that screens batteries and other carriers of heavy metals and which also offers relief to another national problem--by using sewage sludge, another large waste stream, as part of the mix. Recomp, Riedel in Portland, and other firms say they have even solved the odor problem by performing the smelly part of the cycle in an enclosed drum, in a matter of days, or even hours, making it possible to site their plants in city neighborhoods.
Recomp is now designing a second plant, for Bellingham, Wash.
The company also recently ran an experiment for Procter & Gamble, which has sponsored research in several areas to reduce its own contributions to the waste stream. In St. Cloud, Procter & Gamble demonstrated that Recomp’s method could handle one of the most emotional trash issues, disposable diapers. The test was so successful, McNelly boasts, that he could produce good compost from a solid stream of diapers.
Though less than 2% of the municipal waste stream, paper diapers are condemned by many environmentalists for encouraging logging and for loading up landfills with their plastic liners.
But mothers have been reluctant to return to cloth diapers, and some manufacturers have lately marketed disposables lined with plastic alleged to be biodegradable. This is plastic mixed with such additives as cornstarch. They are supposed to break down in the soil, leaving only traces of plastic behind.
“I consider ‘biodegradable’ plastics the No. 1 environmental hoax being perpetrated on the public,” roared McNelly recently. And most environmentalists, plastics manufacturers and waste experts agree. The Environmental Defense Fund and Environmental Action have called for a boycott of products made from degradable plastic, including Hefty and Glad trash bags and Nappies and Tender Care diapers.
Landfills, where these are supposed to degrade, are mostly lightless, airless, waterless tombs where, according to landfill expert William Rathje of the University of Arizona, little actually decomposes--even food scraps, let alone these new diapers. Even some manufacturers of degradable plastics admit they are responding to a consumer fad, not reality.
So far, the St. Cloud composters, particularly, have been getting favorable reviews.
“I think it’s a great facility myself,” says Robert L. Spencer, a biologist specializing in environmental planning. Spencer just surveyed municipal-waste composting projects around the nation, including Recomp’s.
“They have a unique patented system with two operating digesters in this country, and that gives them a distinct advantage,” Spencer says. “If you’re a county commissioner who can go see it in operation, that’s a lot better than for someone to say, ‘Just trust us.’ ”
Desk of Compost
Indeed, on McNelly’s desk these days are plastic bags of experimental products from the big drum below. They all look like dirt of various shades. Yet one is an “ultralight” potting medium for hanging-basket plants, made from ground-up, sanitized plastic diaper liners; another, a cactus mix made from ground glass; another, soil-fungus-fighting compost for golf courses.
And McNelly has made converts. Jerry Johnson, coordinator for the Tri-County Solid Waste Management Commission, in St. Cloud, even bought 80 yards of Recomp’s compost for his lawn.
“Recomp has basically turned us around,” Johnson says, “from wondering whether solid waste compost was really viable, to seeing that you can make a compost that is a marketable, usable product. Two years ago, we all questioned whether you could do that.”
